The Epic Games Store had a record-breaking 2025, with gamers throwing $1.16 billion at the 6,000-plus games it now offers

It took until February but the Epic Games Store has published its year in review for 2025, and it seems like it was a pretty good one all in all: Spending on third-party games—those not developed or published by Epic—went up by 57%, as did the amount of time people spent in them, and the store achieved 78 million monthly active users on PC, a new record.

Other interesting tidbits: The Epic Games Store now offers more than 6,000 games for purchase, and players sunk 6.65 billion gameplay hours into Epic Store games in 2025, which is actually down year-over-year, but hours spent in third party games went up by 4%. The amount of money players spent on the Epic Store also went up, by 6%, to $1.16 billion.

It's all rather dry, especially when compared to Steam's annual 'Replay,' a rundown of all the things you (yes, you) did over the course of the year, like spending half your total gameplay hours in Bongo Cat. (I regret nothing.) But the intended audiences seem very different: While Steam's retrospective is mainly a bit of fun—a way to compare your gaming proclivities to everyone else—Epic's annual review is more about reminding developers and publishers that it exists and (fractional audience aside) offers some pretty compelling advantages.

That's particularly visible in the repeated emphasis on the Epic store's significantly lower revenue cut: While Steam takes 30% of revenues to start and then reduces that percentage as certain sales milestones are hit (25% once sales surpass $10 million, and 20% after $50 million), Epic claims a comparatively paltry 12% across the board—and, as of June 2025, takes nothing on the first $1 million in sales.

Epic also made note of its new Web Shops, and the fact that developers can use their own payment systems in their games, on which Epic takes nothing—all very much in line with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's long-standing criticism of other digital storefronts.

Another upcoming developer-focused, uh, development I find interesting is a new program, set to kick off in the first half of 2026, that aims to "help developers sell more games on the Epic Games Store by leveraging the marketing power of Fortnite." Anyone who buys a participating game on the Epic Store will also get a Fortnite cosmetic item and a matching avatar for their account profile. Initial program partners include Capcom, miHoYo, Pearl Abyss, S-Game, MintRocket, and Kakao Games. I don't play Fortnite myself, but an awful lot of people do, and in hindsight I kind of wonder why this didn't happen years ago.

Which isn't to say that there's nothing in this year in review for people who buy games rather than make them. For all the upbeat talk about how well the Epic Games Store is doing, there's just one small problem: The Epic Games Store launcher sucks. And that's not me saying so, that's Sweeney and Epic Store general manager Steve Allison copping to it. (Although I say so, too. Because it does.) Which is where we store users come more squarely into focus.

Epic trumpeted some of the improvements made to the store over 2025, noting for instance that more than 100,000 gifts were sent via the store after it rolled out gifting in November, and promised that more are on the way. The biggest on the list is a long-overdue rebuild of the launcher, which Epic said "will make the storefront on the launcher responsive and feel good to use, with fast load times and greater stability."

Let me be, not the first to say it, nor the last, but one of the many in the middle: It's about time. Epic's focus on developers appears to have paid off to some extent (it's still alive and kicking, and when you're throwing down with the all-powerful behemoth of Steam, that's not nothing) but the fact is that a lot of potential users make a point of avoiding the Epic store because the launcher is just downright unpleasant. "Clunky," as Sweeney put it in May 2025, is accurate but also probably a lot more polite than most of us would be about it.

And that sucks, because Epic is doing good things for developers, and Steam could certainly use some proper competition. Personally, I don't care much about user reviews or forums or social network features, but it is very important to me that when I fire up your launcher, I'm not given sufficient time to go make a sandwich while I wait for it to load. So, fingers crossed Epic is serious about finally getting that sorted.

Naturally, there's an infographic. There is always an infographic.